There is a scene in "Othello" when the
Moor is so consumed by jealousy and rage that he loses the eloquence
and poetry that make him the most articulate man in Venice. He turns to
the audience, shortly before he murders Desdemona, and sputters, "Goats
and monkeys!" Othello fell prey to wild self-delusion and unchecked
rage, and his words became captive to hollow cliches. The debasement of
language, which Shakespeare understood was a prelude to violence, is
the curse of modernity. We have stopped communicating, even with
ourselves. And the consequences will be as extreme as in the
Shakespearean tragedy.
Those who seek to dominate our behavior
first seek to dominate our speech. They seek to obscure meaning. They
make war on language. And the English- and Arabic-speaking worlds are
each beset with a similar assault on language. The graffiti on the mud
walls of Gaza that calls for holy war or the crude rants of Islamic
militants are expressed in a simplified, impoverished form of Arabic.
This is not the classical language of 1,500 years of science, poetry
and philosophy. It is an argot of cliches, distorted Quranic verses and
slogans. This Arabic is no more comprehensible to the literate in the
Arab world than the carnival barking that pollutes our airwaves is
comprehensible to our literate classes. The reduction of popular
discourse to banalities, exacerbated by the elite's retreat into
obscure, specialized jargon, creates internal walls that thwart real
communication. This breakdown in language makes reflection and debate
impossible. It transforms foreign cultures, which we lack the capacity
to investigate, into reversed images of ourselves. If we represent
virtue, progress and justice, as our cliches constantly assure us, then
the Arabs, or the Iranians, or anyone else we deem hostile, represent
evil, backwardness and injustice. An impoverished language solidifies a
binary world and renders us children with weapons.
How do you respond to "Islam is the
solution" or "Jesus Christ is my Lord and Savior"? How do you converse
with someone who justifies the war in Iraq-as Christopher Hitchens
does-with the tautology that we have to "kill them over there so they
do not kill us over here"? Those who speak in these thought-terminating
cliches banish rational discussion. Their minds are shut. They sputter
and rant like a demented Othello. The paucity of public discourse in
our culture, even among those deemed to be public intellectuals, is
matched by the paucity of public discourse in the Arab world.
This emptiness of language is a gift to
demagogues and the corporations that saturate the landscape with
manipulated images and the idiom of mass culture. Manufactured phrases
inflame passions and distort reality. The collective chants, jargon and
epithets permit people to surrender their moral autonomy to the heady
excitement of the crowd. "The crowd doesn't have to know," Mussolini
often said. "It must believe. ... If only we can give them faith that
mountains can be moved, they will accept the illusion that mountains
are moveable, and thus an illusion may become reality." Always, he
said, be "electric and explosive." Belief can triumph over knowledge.
Emotion can vanquish thought. Our demagogues distort the Bible and the
Constitution, while their demagogues distort the Quran, or any other
foundational document deemed to be sacred, fueling self-exaltation and
hatred at the expense of understanding. The more illiterate a society
becomes, the more power those who speak in this corrupted form of
speech amass, the more music and images replace words and thought. We
are cursed not by a cultural divide but by mutual cultural
self-destruction.
The educated elites in the Arab world are
now as alienated as the educated elites in the United States. To speak
with a vocabulary that the illiterate or semiliterate do not
immediately grasp is to be ostracized, distrusted and often ridiculed.
It is to impart knowledge, which fosters doubt. And doubt in calcified
societies, which prefer to speak in the absolute metaphors of war and
science, is a form of heresy. It was not accidental that the founding
biblical myth saw the deliverer of knowledge as evil and the loss of
innocence as a catastrophe. "This probably had less to do with religion
than with the standard desire of those in authority to control those
who are not," John Ralston Saul wrote. "And control of the Western species of the human race seems to turn upon language."
The infantile slogans that are used to
make sense of the world express, whether in tea party rallies or in
Gaza street demonstrations, a very real alienation, yearning and rage.
These cliches, hollow to the literate, are electric with power to those
for whom these words are the only currency in which they can express
anguish and despair. And as the economy worsens, as war in the Middle
East and elsewhere continues, as our corporate state strips us of power
and reduces us to serfs, expect this rage, and the demented language
used to give it voice, to grow.
The Arabic of the Quran is as poetic as
the intricate theology of Islam. It is nuanced and difficult to master.
But the language of the Quran has been debased in the slums and poor
villages across the Middle East by the words and phrases of political
Islam. This process is no different from what has taken place with
Christianity in the United States. Our mainstream churches have been as
complacent in fighting heretics as have the mainstream mosques and
religious scholars in the Middle East. Demented forms of Christianity
and Islam have largely supplanted genuine and more open forms of
religious expression. And they have done so because liberal elites were
cowed into silence. Corruptions of Islamic terms and passages are as
numerous in the militants' ideology as in the ideology of the Christian
right. The word jihad for the militants means the impunity to
kill, kidnap, hijack and bomb anyone they see as an infidel, including
children and other Muslims. Jihad, however, does not always
mean holy war, or even war, in the Quran. According to Islamic
tradition, the "great jihad" is the battle within one's self to live in
accord with God's will. A jihad, for the prophet Muhammad, is often the
struggle to achieve inner-worldly asceticism, in accord with his call
"to command the good and forbid evil with the heart, the tongue and the
hand." And the Quran condemns the use of violence to propagate the
faith. "There is no compulsion in religion," it states. The Quran also
denounces forced piety and conversion as insincere. Calls to martyrdom,
presented by militants as a direct path toward eternal life,
conveniently eschew the Quran's rigid ban on suicide. But theological
nuance is beside the point for zealots. The fantasies peddled by the
Christian right, from the Rapture, which is not in the Bible, to the
belief that Jesus, who was a pacifist, would bless wars in the Middle
East, injects our own version of sanctified slogans into the
vernacular.
Our crisis is a crisis of language. Victor
Klemperer in his book "Lingua Tertii Imperii" noted that the distortion
of language by the Nazis was vital in creating fascist culture. He was
repeatedly perplexed by how the masses, even those who opposed the
Nazis, willingly ingested the linguistic poison the Nazis used to
perpetuate collective self-delusion. "Words may be little doses of
arsenic," he wrote. "They are consumed without being noticed; they seem
at first to have no effect, but after a while, indeed, the effect is
there."